Dean Valentine

It's crunch time at Walt Disney Co.'s television studio. To stock its newly acquired ABC network with shows, Disney is scrambling to churn out television production in such short order that some in Hollywood wonder whether the studio has bitten off more than it can chew. Since completing its purchase of Capital Cities/ABC Inc.

Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog are going home. The family of late Muppets creator Jim Henson said Wednesday that it would buy the company it sold in March 2000 to Munich, Germany-based EM.TV & Merchandising. The Henson family said it would acquire the characters -- as well as TV and motion picture production companies and a special effects unit known as the Creature Shop -- for $78 million. That's far less than the $680 million that EM.TV paid for Jim Henson Co. just three years ago.

As what might be called the second-generation networks played meet the press this week, Fox, the WB and UPN outlined programming philosophies that underscore how broadcasting has shifted from courting everyone to targeting narrow segments of the viewing audience.

Windy City-Bound: NBC's "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" will travel to Chicago for five nights starting April 29. The road trip, planned to coincide with the all-important May ratings sweeps period, marks the first time the entire "Tonight Show" has visited the Windy City. (Leno made a solo trip there in February 1995 to tape some comedy sketches.) Meanwhile, a previously announced "Tonight Show" trip to New York, originally scheduled for this spring, will take place in November, NBC said.

While controversy continues to swirl around the stream of unscripted series, UPN, which aired the low-rated "Chains of Love" last season, is moving away from the sexy and salacious nature of the genre--at least for now. Dean Valentine, president and CEO of UPN, told a gathering of TV reporters and critics in Pasadena on Monday that the network was not developing additional shows in the vein of "Chains of Love," in which singles were handcuffed to four members of the opposite sex.

The two broadcasting entities vying for the title of "fifth network" outlined very different visions of the future over the weekend, with executives at WB saying broadcasters must focus on reaching more targeted audiences, while rivals at UPN maintained that any network following a "narrowcast" model is "ultimately doomed to failure."

The company behind Snow White was bedeviled by white snow Wednesday as a blizzard kept scores of Walt Disney Co. stockholders and most of its directors from attending the company's annual meeting in Denver. But Chairman Michael Eisner insisted that Disney can weather its own storms, even as fellow executives acknowledged that war with Iraq and a soft economy would reduce earnings growth from the company's ambitious 25% to 35% earlier projection.

Hopes among writers and actors that fascination with unscripted programming would be a flash in the pan were delivered a setback this week, as two so-called "reality" shows--Fox's "Temptation Island," which arrived awash in controversy, and ABC's "The Mole"--premiered to solid ratings, especially among the younger viewers most coveted by advertisers. "Temptation Island" made its debut Wednesday with an estimated 16.1 million viewers, trailing only NBC's largely unfazed "The West Wing"--at 17.

Angry sparks have been ignited at "Sparks," the UPN comedy about a family-run urban law firm. The creator and the star of the series are upset that UPN has cut four episodes off the 22 shows that were planned for production this season. Although "Sparks" is still officially on the UPN schedule, those on the show say the cutback is a clear sign to them that the series, now in its second season, has been unceremoniously canceled. Series creator Ed.

Like most major art museums, Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art gets a rush of art gifts at the end of each year, when collectors typically make tax-deductible contributions. It now appears that 1999 was a particularly good year for MOCA--and not only because of tax breaks. Of the 120 works added to the museum's collection last year, 17 pieces were donated in honor of Jeremy Strick, who succeeded director Richard Koshalek last July.